Dead Beginnings
by Taylor9515
Summary: Masato moves into his brother's apartment, where he meets Inoue Orihime, a student that goes to the same school he's moving into. He's nervous about going, because he's not like other people. No one else alive had gone through what he had. He quickly befriends Ichigo and the group, and gets heavily involved with the spirit world. What will happen when he changes sides?
1. Yamashita Masato

_Ring!_ The school bell ended the day. Yamashita Masato opened up his yearbook and placed a black Sharpie on its open spine. He listened to all the buzz around him with one hand on the small whiteboard in his lap and the other holding two dry-erase markers, one red, one black.

"How're you doing, Masato?" His girlfriend, Amami Emi, walked up to the boy's desk.

The boy opened up his black marker and wrote '_depressed, as usual_' on his board.

"Mind if I sign your yearbook?"

His response was to pick up the Sharpie and hold it out to his only friend.

"Thanks. Here you can sign mine." She took her yearbook out of her bag and swapped it with the one on the desk. He took the sharpie and started writing. Things like '_Thanks for being there for me_' and '_I'll miss you_' in it, finally ending with, '_Love you, Yamashita Masato_'. He handed her back her yearbook. She placed his back on his desk.

"You're moving today, aren't you?" He nodded with his white board. "I wish I could go with you, but I need to stay here for the last year of high school. I'll find you. Or, better yet, you'll find me." Another nod with the whiteboard. "I love you." She leaned forward, her lips puckered. He reached up to give her a light kiss before the other kids started snickering. She left with one final goodbye, leaving him there with a bunch of kids who ignored him.

Masato sighed and packed up his stuff. He went out of the room and hung a left, heading towards the exit. Before he got even halfway there, he heard a commotion down another hallway. He turned to see his girlfriend being surrounded by a bunch of the muscle-type kids of the school. They were saying things like _Insanity_ and _creep_. Masato dropped his things and crept silently behind them. They were about to beat her up.

Before he knew it, his fist was connecting with the side of the spokesman's head. The man fell like a ragdoll. The other dudes milled around in confusion. Masato stepped up and gave Emi a kiss on her cheek. She gasped, before recovering her composure.

"That was his doing right there," she said to the creeps. They just stared at her.

"I don't believe you," said one of the bigger thugs.

"Hit him," said Emi. Masato punched the kid in the nose, feeling it break. Blood squirted out of it and onto his hand. He held it out as if it was a lighted torch, and the other kids fastened their eyes onto it. One of the smarter, more witty ones looked somewhere by the boys left ear and spoke.

"So, how is it like to be our resident dead kid?"


	2. Resident Dead Kid

The kid fell to the ground with his hands clasped around his groin. _Too bad for him I didn't forget my cleats that day_, Masato thought. He walked away with his bloody hand and now bloody shoe. He picked up his bag and carried it out to the car that was waiting for him. He threw his stuff into the back seat and hopped into the front. His brother, Tadayoshi, was in the drivers' seat.

After a minute, he said, "For the sake of my windshield, please put on your seatbelt." He did. "Thank you." Tadayoshi started the car and drove home. They didn't speak on the way back, mostly because Tadayoshi couldn't hear him anyway. When they got there, their parents' van was not in the driveway.

"I'll leave a note on the door. Grab whatever stuff you still want to keep and leave the rest. Tap me on the shoulder if you need help, okay?" Masato tapped the dashboard twice, and then got out of the vehicle. His brother and his girlfriend were the only ones sympathetic to him. But they didn't show him pity. They just helped him adapt to being dead.

He went straight to his old room to grab some of his video games and such, mostly the ones his brother didn't already have, plus all his Pokémon games. He crammed them all into the sports bag that held all his spare clothes for soccer. He proceeded to sling that over his back, grab a single hat, and head out to the car. He met his brother there, and they went to his brother's place.

He had been walking to soccer practice when he was hit by a drunk driver. The man had plowed through him as if he wasn't there, and then crashed into a telephone pole. Masato had walked around the van to see his own corpse crushed between the driver and the pole. He had the privilege to watch himself officially die three days later. He continued to go to school, but nobody took any notice in him. That is, until he got so fed up with death that he threw a pencil from somebody else's desk at the teacher. The boy nearly got in trouble until he did it again.

His parents were forced to admit that he was still there after that, but didn't want to deal with their dead kid. So he and his brother decided it was best for Masato to live with Tadayoshi in the apartment in Karakura Town until he, well, passed on.

"We're here."

They arrived in front of a two-story apartment building. It was a pleasant beige color with plain handrails and bland wooden doors. Very well-kept.

Masato walked up the stairs with his stuff. While waiting for his brother to come and unlock the door, he saw the door next to his open and a girl walk out. She was a very pretty woman in her late teens, her red hair reaching her waist. Her dress was two different shades of purple and bore pictures of flowers. When she looked up at Masato, she seemed to look at him, and not at his bag. The girl smiled.

"Hello. I'm Inoue Orihime. I don't think I've seen you around here before. Do you live here?"

It took Masato a few seconds to realize that she was talking to _him_, and a few more to find his voice. "H-Hi. *cough* My name is Yamashita Masato. I am actually just moving here now."

"Good. Well, you'll like Karakura Middle School."

"I'm a high schooler. Senior."

She looked a little blank at that. "Aren't you a little-"

"Small?" He finished for her. "Yeah, I got that a lot." He'd always been small for his age, and there probably wasn't a chance of a growth spurt now. Then he froze up. He hadn't meant to use past tense.

Orihime didn't seem to notice. "Hopefully you get transferred into my class. Anyway, we have a spectacular soccer team, and a bunch of nice people there." _Yeah, people like _you _who can see and hear me_. Good Bye." She walked past him towards the stairs. Masato heard his brother's voice.

"Good afternoon, Orihime."

"Hello, Tadayoshi. I'm just on my way to the grocer."

"Have a safe trip. Don't let those Hollows trip you up."

"I won't. Bye"

Tadayoshi came up the stairs, shaking his head. He looked a bit above his little brother's bag. "I swear, if she wasn't so naïve, I'd ask her out on a date. Hollows, _huh_." He unlocked the door.

"What are hollows?" Masato asked, slinging his bag onto the couch. His brother just ignored him, heading straight for the kitchen. Masato grabbed his bag roughly, as to make noise, and took out his whiteboard to repeat the question in writing.

"Hollows? I have no idea, but the way she talks about them, it's like they are monsters that had their hearts ripped out. Or something." He opened the fridge and grabbed some soda out of it.

Masato wrote some more.

"Really? Well, maybe there is some truth to her stories. But if I know one thing, it's that you are going to have a good life here." He kept on going, not noticing his misuse of vocab. "If the first native you meet here is someone you like, or in your case, can see and talk to you, it's and omen. We are up for an exciting summer."


	3. New School

As it turned out, nothing spectacular happened in the Yamashita apartment. At least, nothing abnormally spectacular. If a stranger had walked in at any given moment, he or she would have seen any one of several objects floating in midair. A game controller, a pencil, a remote, and keys would seem to use themselves.

It was the first day of school when Tadayoshi's prediction came true.

Masato walked into class with his backpack in his hand. No one noticed it floating by their legs. He walked to the back of the room and sat down in an empty desk. The sounds of what the students were talking about seemed interesting, so he tuned in.

"Soccer tryouts are next week," a very tall brunette was saying to her friends.

"Do you think you're going to do well on the final?" a very hyper guy asked someone else.

"School hasn't even started yet," said that someone else back to the hyper guy.

"First day of school, and no Hollows have attacked so far," said a strawberry blond dude to a huge guy and one of those cool geeks.

"Chizuro!" yelled a raven-haired girl at a girl with red locks. It looked as if the second girl had been gro-

_Hollows?_

Masato turned his attention back to the strawberry blond kid. He had just mentioned something called a _Hollow_ to his friends. What that was wasn't important, just that they knew what it was. Orihime did, too. Speaking of Orihime…

"Ohayo!" she called in her cheery manner as she walked into class. She received a few responses, but most of the people ignored her. She walked straight over to the small group and sat right down. She asked for someone to catch her up, and the geek told her about the Hollows. _That's it_ Masato thought, _I'm going to go _talk_ to them_. He stood up with his bag down low and took an empty seat by their group. Just as he thought, they stopped talking about Hollows when he got close.

"Ohayo, Masato-san," said Orihime. The others looked surprised.

"You know him?" asked the geek.

"Yes, Ishida-kun. I met him at the beginning of the summer. He moved into the apartment next to mine with Tadayoshi-san." This seemed to make sense with the gee- Ishida. Orihime turned back to Masato. "But I haven't seen you since then. Why?"

It seemed like an honest question. "I never really felt like going outside. I didn't have any new friends yet, and my brother did all the shopping." This satisfied her, but not the blond kid.

"Isn't it a law that you can't wear the Konoha soccer uniform here?" He was rewarded with a few evil glares from his classmates. Masato looked down at himself, at his old soccer uniform. He sighed.

"I'll wear something else tomorrow," he said, knowing he had only one other set of clothes. He -had died with his sports bag, somehow. "But I don't think-" he was cut off when the girl named Chizuro tackled Orihime from behind. This time, she didn't grope the prey, she just suffocated it.

"I'm, glad you're back," she said loudly.

"You told me that last year," Orihime choked out.

"Anyway, this afternoon, there's a live show of Don Kanonji from the United States! I want you to come over and watch it with me." Chizuro made a move to sit on Masato's lap.

"I don't think I'm going to come," said Orihime. "I don't really like him anymore."

The huge guy and the blond guy noticed that Chizuro was about to sit on me a second after Masato did, but it was too late. Masato pinched her butt. The result, Chizuro jumped about three feet in the air and ran as far away from him as possible. She yelled back.

"Tatsuki, I love you, but I never expected _that_ from you."

Tatsuki looked confused, sitting down next to Orihime. "What did I do?"

Masato pulled a rubber band from his bag and pulled it around his hand in a gun fashion while Chizuro answered.

"Don't play dumb. You're the only one who would be violent enough to pinch me in the-" Masato closed one eye and twitched his pinkie. Chizuro yipped when the rubber band hit her right boob, then covered up and ran out of the room. Correction, she ran straight into Ochi-sensei. The teacher told Chizuro to sit back down and that class was about to start.

"Now, where were we on introductions?" Masato asked, bringing the group back to task.

"Right," Orihime said. "This is Ishida Uryu." Uryu didn't acknowledge his name; he just pushed his glasses further up on his face. "This is Yasutora Sado, also known as Chad." Chan grunted. "And this is Kurosaki Ichigo."

"Yo," said Ichigo. Masato responded in kind.

"Now, what were you talking about a few minutes ago?" Masato asked. "Something about _Hollows_?" All four of them stiffened a bit.

"You shouldn't have heard that," said Uryu.

"Can you at least tell me why I shouldn't have heard it?"

"Because you won't be able to see them," said Ichigo. Uryu looked to him. "What? Might as well tell him. He asked for it, one way or another." Ichigo looked back at Masato. "A Hollow is just a dead spirit. It's a monster that eats the spirits of its family to ease the pain of its death, then moves on to sate its infinite hunger."

"To put it bluntly," noted Orihime.

Masato chuckled inwardly. "Is there a difference between Hollows and other spirits?"

"Only a little," said Uryu. "A Hollow is a spirit that has lost its heart."

"So, if I could see them, how could I tell the difference?"

Uryu looked a little suspicious of Masato, seeing that the newcomer was asking questions that hadn't been asked before. "A Hollow is usually much bigger, and will always have a mask and a hole through its chest. It will look like a monster. A regular spirit looks just like a person, except they have a chain coming out of their chests."

Masato thought back to the very long chain he had when he had first died. It had been attached to his chest by some funny pattern. The other end had been tied around his dead body. When his body officially died, the chain had grown mouths and started eating itself. It tore a chunk out of his hand, too. So Masato, being full of confusion, had bit it back. The chain had promptly fallen off and stopped eating itself. It was still in his spirit sports bag.

Masato was about to ask another question, but the bell rang and the teacher started tapping the chalkboard. "All right, settle down," she said. "I know this is your last year here, but you still need to get through it. Sit down, everybody!" She sighed when the brown-haired, hyper dude got off his desk and into his seat. "Thank you, Keigo. Well, everyone here knows each other, except one." People started looking around, trying to find the newbie, and most of them didn't even glance at Masato. "Will Yamashita Masato come up…?" The teacher trailed off, looking just as confused as the students. "That can't be right," she muttered to herself.

Masato stood up and walked down the aisle, letting his hands brush up against everyone he passed. They all shivered and followed his path as others shivered. He walked up to the board and grabbed a piece of chalk. People gasped. He started writing: _My name is Yamashita Masato. If you have a question, get it over with now._

The teacher was the first up. She asked her question while glancing between the board and her roll sheet. "Are you … really… you know?" Ochi-sensei was stuttering, something she hardly ever did.

Masato wrote on the board. _Yes, I am dead._


End file.
